Buzz This!

Working on a new launch

We are currently working on a major new launch. Please keep an eye on this blog for announcements.

As a complete aside, I'm running my personal blog using WordPress.org and LineBuzz's blog uses Typepad.com. I'm beginning to understand why all you Wordpress users are so fanatical about the product. It's awesome, and writing this in Typepad is rather ordinary. It's funny because I've been a Typepad fan for about 5 years now.

My personal blog

I've decided that my introspections belong on my personal blog. So after more than a 1 year hiatus, I've resurrected my personal blog at markmaunder.com.

Staying small and nimble

There's a great article over at Time about 37 Signals, a company I've admired for some time. They have a team of 8 employees and produce some pretty amazing software.

We're a small team too. Our previous project was a vertical search engine and our current one is, of course, LineBuzz.

So here are some random thoughts in no particular order and from no particular category on how to stay lean and nimble and bootstrap on the cheap:

• The closest we ever come to a meeting is a casual chat wherever we find ourselves. Sometimes we grab paper out of the printer and take notes.
• When it comes to project planning, we prioritize, figure out time-scales, write the plan and then walk away from it. We don't live and die by it or beat anyone over the head with it. It's a guideline. The software is ready when it's ready and it's simply assumed that everyone is working as hard and smart as possible.
• I tend to avoid development methodologies or ideologies. Stuff like XP or Agile development is another excuse for a meeting. I also avoid any tools that introduce bureaucracy into the code or development process. Just write the darn code, test and debug it until it's rock solid and then deploy!
• I only use open source. Early in my career I worked as a Systems Engineer on Oracle and Microsoft stuff. I learned early on how much commercial server software and consulting costs (thankfully I was on the receiving end). Anyone who isn't using MySQL and Linux (or other oss equivalents) is spending a lot of money. If you run a diamond mine then that's cool (I used to work for De Beers too!). But if you're running a startup then it's probably a bad idea.
• It's so tempting to spend money sometimes. Yeah I know Rackspace's hosting looks hot. I know you're just dying to hire that PR firm. And it's so much fun tweaking your AdWords campaigns. A lot of that stuff you can do yourself or get it done on the cheap. Instead of PPC advertising become an SEO guru. Instead of Rackspace, use their sister company ServerBeach (same hosting facility, a quarter of the price). Instead of hiring that PR firm, just make a few good friends in the blogging community.

That's it for a Friday night. Have a great weekend!

Your features are next.

We are working on a new release of LineBuzz. Our previous version focused on Internationalization and making the product a lot more solid internally. We are very excited about the next version which will be incorporating all the features that you requested, getting rid of the stuff you don't like, and much more.

This blog will be fairly quiet until the next launch, which should be in several weeks. See you then! :)

Mark.

Translating "Inline Comments" into Chinese

I bought my first book on Chinese yesterday. "Master basic Mandarin in 30 days" didn't strike me as being worth the paper it's printed on. So instead I bought a book about the language itself - it's history, information about the dialects, where each dialect is spoken, etc. I may as well go into this with my eyes open. To reach basic proficiency in most European languages takes about 500 hours of study for an English speaker. Mandarin takes 2500 hours.

My friend in China, He Caitou is running a poll on his blog to figure out what the best translation is for "Inline Comments". You can read his blog using Google's very rough translation here.

Submit your widget design

Our next release will include a widget wizard that lets you customize the colors of the LineBuzz widget. Some of our users have said the current widget is too big for their needs. So we're going to provide two options. One will be the current list of newest comments and the other will be a badge. The badge (at this stage) looks like this:

I'd love to know what you think, so email me at mark at linebuzz dot com or just post an inline comment here.

If you would like to submit a badge, send your designs to mark at linebuzz dot com. You can do it in your own language and your own color scheme. I've included a large bitmap of Reggie for you to use. Reggie is trademarked by LineBuzz so please don't use him for anything else. The badge needs to have the word 'LineBuzz' in it and must include Reggie. It must also communicate to our users that you need to highlight text with your mouse to post an inline comment.

Once you submit your badge, we own all rights to it, but we will give credit to the authors of any user submitted badges on the widget install page.

Have fun!

Mark (马孟德)

LineBuzz Wiki launched

This evening we launched a small (but growing) Wiki for LineBuzz users. We have already added:

• Our FAQ
• How to install LineBuzz on Blogger (complete with screenshots)
• How to install LineBuzz on Typepad (screenshots too)

And there are a couple of other articles. If you're a linebuzz user in any language, you're welcome to contribute. You don't even need to register on the wiki to edit our articles or to post your own.

Enjoy!

Mark Maunder (马孟德)

《LineBuzz国际版火热登场》

[To our chinese users - a translation of the I18N blog entry below, courtesy He Caitou]

《LineBuzz国际版火热登场》

今晚我们发布了支持所有语言和字符设定的LineBuzz国际版，如果您在自己的BLOG上已经使用了LineBuzz，那么您将自动获得我们的最新版。
这里我首先要感谢那些勇敢的Blogger，你们最早安装了LineBuzz的用户初体验版。正是因为你们的果敢尝试，得以让我们获得了大量数据，由此让我们得以完成现在的国际版。
以下，是我们最新国际版的精华所在：
• 现在，我们支持所有的语言和所有的字符设定。虽然我们建议您使用UTF-8编码，但是如果您使用了其他的字符设定，LineBuzz国际版也同样支持！我 们已经在使用如下字符设定的BLOG上测试了LineBuzz: UTF-8、EUC-JP、 Shift_JIS、iso-8859-1、cp1252、 EUC-CN、EUC-KR 以及GB2312。您的评注内容已经被我们保存为您的母语字符设定，所以即便我们并不明白您所写的评注内容，但是它依然能够奏效。
• 您现在可以通过LineBuzz home page看到所有以您的母语发布的评注，这只需要您在我们首页的下拉菜单中选择一下您的语言。其中，我们支持所有的大语种。只要我们有了其它语种的新用户，我们将在列表中添加支持可支持的新语种。
• 我们增加了a comment restore tool（评注修改工具）功能。如果您想编辑您在某段话上增添的评注，您可以很容易地编辑并重新插入评注。同时，您可以使用这一工具重新设定在某个BLOG里的评注。.
• 我们提供了海量常见问题问答.
• 我们已经针对上百个Blog进行了大量测试，其语言、字符、和HTML语法所涵盖的范围相当巨大。为此，根据由此而来的新发现，我们更新了我们的常见问题 问答。其中最重要的发现是：如果您的HTML页面中出现了一个错误，那么您的评注会在某些特定的浏览器中正常显示，但是却无法在另外的浏览器中正常显示。 我们的常见问题问答中对此提供了解释。如果您的确遇到了这种问题，评注修改工具可以侦测出哪些评注有问题，而且一旦您纠正了HTML页面，就可以立即恢复 它们。
• 我们稍微美化了一点LineBuzz.com的站点。
• 我们修正了大量的Bug，使得LineBuzz相对而言是一个较为稳定的网络产品。
对于LineBuzz我们有很多精彩的构想和改进，目前我们正倾力工作以期在未来几周内呈现给您。您的来信将让我们极为高兴，如果您有任何需求，请致函：Mark at linebuzz.com.
顺颂 夏祺
Mark Maunder（马孟德）

LineBuzz I18N is now Live!!!

We've released an international version of LineBuzz tonight that has support for all languages and all character sets. If you use LineBuzz on your blog, you automatically have the newest version.

Firstly, I'd like to thank all the brave international bloggers that grabbed the first version of LineBuzz and installed it. You provided us with a massive amount of data that helped us tremendously with this international version. Special thanks to He Caitou in China for his help and support.

Here are some of the highlights in this release:

• We now support all languages and all character sets. We recommend you use UTF-8, but if you use another character set we will support you! We have tested LineBuzz with blogs using the following charsets: UTF-8, EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, iso-8859-1, cp1252, EUC-CN, EUC-KR and GB2312. We store your comments in your native character set, so even if we can't understand it, it should still work.
• You can now see comments in your own language on the LineBuzz home page. Simply select your language from the drop down list. We support all major languages internally, so as we get more users in other languages, we will add them to the list.
• We have added a comment restore tool. So if you edit some text in a paragraph that has been commented, you can simply reinsert your comment. You can also use this tool to reposition comments in a blog entry.
• We have a vastly expanded FAQ.
• We have done extensive testing across hundreds of blogs. The range of languages, character sets and HTML syntax is huge. We have updated our FAQ with some of our findings. The most significant fact we found is that if you have an error in your HTML, your comment may appear in one browser, but not in another. Our FAQ explains why. If you do have this problem, the comment restore tool gives you a way to detect which comments are having problems and to restore them once you repair any bad HTML.
• We made things a little prettier on the LineBuzz.com website.
• We fixed a wide range of bugs and generally made LineBuzz a much more solid product.

We have a bunch of awesome features and improvements we're working on and will roll them out over the coming weeks. What we'd really like is to hear from you. Let us know what you guys want by emailing me at mark at linebuzz.com.

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Blogsphere coverage, I18N and release schedules

I've burnt our release schedule. We're using the same approach to software development that MySQL and Google use. Rather than set a date in stone, and getting the marketing team to create a bunch of artificial hype and get the developers scrambling to make the launch date, we release software when its ready. Our I18N release is imminent, just a few more days.

Brian Heys wrote a great article covering LineBuzz on his blog this week. From Brian's blog:

Inline comments are extremely powerful, and could potentially revolutionize the way people leave comments on blogs. At the moment, none of the major blogging platforms support inline commenting as part of their standard packages, but that could be about to change, now that LineBuzz has arrived on the scene, and is starting to make a splash.

Google's Blog Search shows 32 pages for this week that mention LineBuzz - many of them are Chinese or Japanese and it's getting to the point where I think I should probably just bite the bullet and learn the Language. I was actually in Tokyo a few months ago and fell in love with the city and friendly people even though my time there was far too short.

Mark.